“Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?” I forced a smile. I liked Henry, and I wouldn’t mind seeing him. But I didn’t want to try to talk about my past, or the things he’d told me the last time I’d seen him, and I hoped he wouldn’t bring it up.
She hugged me again. “Come on,” she said. “I need your help to roll the matzo balls.”
It was just like when we were kids. Only then, Julia and I stood at Mamele’s apron, staring up, watching her roll the balls in her large palms.
I washed my hands and dug my fingers into the bowl of cold sticky matzo meal, my past soaking in through my fingers. It was still here, whether I wanted it or not.
It wasn’t until Henry rang the bell a few hours later that Julia told me the rest of the story. “We have a few other guests coming for dinner too,” she said nonchalantly, as she seasoned the soup, like she hoped I wouldn’t notice if she slipped it in right along with a pinch of salt and grind of pepper.
“Friends of yours?” I asked.
“Not exactly . . . a few Jewish women Henry has worked with. They didn’t have anywhere else to go.” Julia was talking fast. She knew it was more than that. Henry must’ve told her everything.
I opened my mouth to protest, but it was too late. One of the boys had already answered the door, and Henry was walking in, three unfamiliar women with him. “Hanna.” Henry smiled when he saw me. I lifted my hand to wave, but my eyes drifted to the women behind him. They were all young, maybe younger than me, and I was certain I had never seen them before in my life. Or had I?
“Everyone, this is Bernie . . . Franciszka . . . Adelle.” He pointed to each woman, left to right, each of them lifting an arm to say hello. Bernie had a number tattooed on her wrist; she fiddled with it self-consciously when she waved. Is she the one who told Henry about the orchestra? But I didn’t see a flash of recognition on her face as Henry introduced me, nor on any of their faces. I was a stranger to them, as they were strangers to me.
“Come,” Julia said. “Everyone have a seat. It is almost sundown.”
“It has been so long since I have had Seder,” Franciszka said. Her English was stilted, her accent unfamiliar. Not German, nor French. “I was little girl,” she said. “The youngest one. I sang questions. Czwórka.” She held up four fingers.
“Four questions,” Adelle corrected her kindly, in English. “But when we sing them in Hebrew we all speak the same language, yes?”
“Moritz is the youngest tonight,” Julia said. “And we’ve been practicing, haven’t we, darling?” Moritz grinned, still not too old to adore being the center of attention. He was a performer, just like me.
Julia arranged the Seder plate in the center of the table and passed around the very same Haggadahs we had used so many years ago in Germany. She must have taken them with her when she fled, and I ran my fingers across the worn leather cover, the familiar Hebrew letters on the front, grateful that Julia had gone when she had, that she had saved something, however small, from our childhood.
Dusk came outside Julia’s front window, and she lit the candles on the table. The curtains were open, and our Seder was in full view to anyone who might be walking by, no one giving this exposure a second thought the way we had last time we’d done this in Gutenstat, before Mamele had died. That year we had pulled the curtains tight, and I’d been reminded by Julia to whisper-sing, so there was no chance that anyone passing by would hear us.
“Louder,” Julia said to Moritz, as his voice wobbled a little on the first question. “Sing it out darling, the way Tante plays the violin.”
At the mention of my violin, I looked down at my plate, but when I raised my eyes again, no one was looking at me. All eyes were on Moritz, singing the words loudly, off-key.
After dinner I escaped onto the balcony off Julia’s kitchen with a cup of tea. I wasn’t trying to be rude, but talk over dessert had turned to the war. Henry shared about how his younger brother had been sent to the front lines, and how worried he’d been for his safety until he’d returned remarkably unscathed. I never knew he had a brother, but Julia nodded like she already understood all there was to know about him. Then Franciszka began speaking of when her family was arrested in Poland. And my head started to hurt in a way it hadn’t in years, since I’d first come to London, trying so hard to remember. It was easier not to try, to let the past linger hazily behind me. The air outside on the balcony was damp, but springlike. I took a deep breath and looked out at the building next to Julia’s. Across the way, through the window, another family was having their own Seder.
“Do you mind if I sit with you?” Adelle had opened the door and noiselessly stepped out while I’d been spying on the neighbors.
“No, of course not,” I lied, gesturing to the empty chair across from me. She didn’t say anything for a moment, and then she said, “I played the violin as a little girl. I wasn’t very good, though.” She laughed a little, twisted her fingers together in her lap.
“You are the one,” I said softly. “You told Henry about the orchestra in the camp?” She looked down at her hands. My heart beat wildly in my chest; my skin felt hot the way it did when I closed my eyes and played a solo. I stared at her fingers, twisting together. “You do not have a tattoo,” I said, and I did not mean to doubt her, though it might have come out sounding that way.
“They only did that at some of the camps,” she said softly. “I guess I was lucky then, eh? I had a number pinned to my shirt as they tried to work me to death.”
Lucky? I felt ashamed for questioning her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Yes,” she interrupted me. “You don’t remember the war. Henry told me.”
“Do you remember me?” I asked, though the words felt impossible even as I said them. “Did we know each other?” How could she know me, when I did not know her? How could she remember me in a time when I could not remember myself?
“No,” she said. And I exhaled, not realizing I’d been holding my breath. “We did not know anyone but the girls who worked with us. And hunger. Oh, we knew hunger so very well.” Her voice broke a little. It was a struggle for her to speak about it, to remember it again, now. “The women in the orchestra, they had it much better than us, you see. A warm place to sleep, more food to eat, less work. We didn’t intermingle with them. But we heard their music. They played when prisoners came in and when prisoners came out. And I hated them.” She shook her head a little. “But you do not know what kind of person you will be until you are truly starving, no?” She said it to me like I would understand it. I nodded, but I didn’t. Or if I did, I couldn’t remember.
“Tante.” Moritz opened the door, interrupting. He sounded out of breath. “Mother wants you to play violin for us. Will you, please?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, suddenly uneasy about playing in front of Adelle, who had felt hatred for the women in the orchestra at her camp.
“Yes,” Adelle said, her tone sounding more pleasant, as she was no longer talking about her past. “Please do.”
“I’ll come in a moment,” I told Moritz, motioning for him to close the door and go back inside. I grabbed my teacup and saucer from the wrought-iron table and stood to go inside myself.
“She had curls like you,” Adelle said, putting her fingers on my arm. “I remember because we were all shaven, and the girls in the orchestra weren’t. And the violinist . . . her hair . . . I could see her off in the distance sometimes, from behind. She had such beautiful, beautiful curls.”
“A lot of people have curly hair like mine,” I said curtly. Julia had almost identical hair to mine.
“Yes,” she agreed with me, reaching up to touch her own short curls. “I guess a lot of us used to.”
Back inside Julia’s apartment, I did not realize my hands were shaking, until I picked up my violin. I tried to breathe deep, to steady myself. “Play us all those delightful songs you used to play as a little girl,” Julia said, and it surprised me, because it was the first ti
me she ever admitted that she thought my playing back then was delightful.
I closed my eyes, put my violin under my chin. I remembered them all so well: Beethoven, Bach, Handel, even Mendelssohn, and yet my fingers were frozen. I could not play a single German song of my youth. My mind knew all the notes, but my fingers would not allow it.
“Go on,” Julia was saying. “Don’t be shy.”
My mind was blank for a moment, not able to think of anything else, but then it came to me: the Saint-Saëns solo I was playing the night I saw Max in the gardens in Paris, and I exhaled and began to play a concert, just for them.
When I finished, I was breathing hard, and I opened my eyes. But I would not look in Adelle’s direction. I could not meet her eyes.
Max, 1935
It was worse than before, coming back. Max’s mind was numb, nearly blank. He had gotten Marta and David to safety, he felt that much was true. But when he returned to the shop, he’d been painfully dizzy, his head too heavy to hold it upright, and he slept fitfully for days and days. The closet had affected him, changed him, the way it had once changed his mother, then his father. He could not go back again until he would take Hanna, no matter what. He could not risk anything happening to him before he got her to safety.
Once he finally slept off most of his headache, he found his mother’s ring sitting on the counter downstairs in the shop, a note from Hanna scribbled on the same paper he’d left her. At the bottom she’d written only: Wir sind fertig. We’re finished. He felt defeated as he picked up the ring, put it back in his pocket. He would have to win her back all over again, and it made him feel so weary, his body and his head still aching from the trip. But what other choice did he have? He loved her. And she would play in another orchestra, in another time, because he would get her out of this one, the same way he had gotten Marta and David and the Feinsteins out.
Hanna refused to talk to him for weeks. It didn’t matter how many times he showed up at her apartment door on Maulbeerstrasse or waited for her outside her lesson at the Lyceum. He wrote her letters, left books on her doorstep. German books, of course, just in case anyone else should see them sitting there. Love stories, with happy endings. And when he would return the next day, the books would be gone, but whether she read them or his notes, who could say?
And then one night, in the middle of August, she appeared at the entrance to his shop, carrying a stack of books and her violin. And though she frowned when he opened the door, his first thought was that she had finally forgiven him.
“Hanna,” he breathed. “I’ve missed you.”
“I just wanted to return these.” She walked inside and put the stack of books on the counter.
“Please.” He put his hand on her shoulder; she yanked away. They’d been here before, and he hated it. Hated having Hanna angry with him. Hated that he couldn’t find the words to make her understand why he’d left and how he hadn’t meant to. “I’m never leaving you again. I promise,” he said now. “Just please, sit down and talk to me. We can go upstairs, I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
“You’ve said that before.” She did not sound angry, more, tired. “I can’t be with someone who’s always running away from me.”
“I’m not running from you.” He pulled her close, kissed the top of her head, and for just a moment she let him hold her. “That’s not the way it is,” he said. “I was helping people . . . Don’t you trust me?”
“I did,” she said softly.
“Well, can you believe me when I tell you I didn’t want to leave you?”
“That doesn’t even make any sense. You’re a grown man. If you don’t want to leave someone, you don’t leave someone.” She stepped out of his embrace and held up her violin case. “There has only been one thing in my life that has never left me.” Her violin.
“Your audition?” he asked tentatively, reading her face for any signs of whether it had gone well, or badly.
“It’s in two weeks’ time,” she said. “Actually, that’s the real reason why I came . . .” She looked down at her feet, not daring to meet his eyes again, as if she were afraid to forgive him, to love him still. “Could I practice here in the shop? The acoustics are better and I practice better here.”
“Of course!” He could barely contain his joy, to be able to hear her play again, just for him, the notes seeping up through the floor of his bedroom, a lullaby and a love song, both at once.
“This doesn’t mean I forgive you,” she insisted. “Or want to be with you. It only means that I like to practice here. And I really need to practice.” Her voice broke a little; she was nervous. She didn’t want to mess up this audition like she had the last one. And somehow that was more important to her than everything else.
“Whatever you need,” he said. “I love you. And I’m here.”
But she was no longer looking at him, no longer listening. She was already taking her violin from its case, rosining the bow. She held it up to her chin and began to play. And his entire body grew warm, standing so close to her, listening to her play.
The day of her audition, Max was so nervous he could barely breathe. He closed the shop early, rode the train into the city. She was auditioning at the symphony hall, and he waited for her outside on the sidewalk. Whether it had gone well or gone badly, he wanted to be with her afterward. He wanted all the stress and worry and anxiousness about the audition to fall away, and then for her to put her arms around him, to whisper in his ear that of course, she forgave him now. She would be with him now. She trusted him. She loved him.
He paced out on the sidewalk in front of the hall. The afternoon was quite warm, and thunderclouds swelled above him, gray and heavy with moisture.
At half past two, Hanna finally walked out, the sun glinted through a cloud, turned her face into a yellow blur for a moment. He could not tell, at first, whether she was elated or devastated.
“Hanna,” he called out, waving. She turned to find the sound of his voice and then she ran to him, jumped up and hugged him. “It went well?” he asked, but he was certain from her reaction that it had.
“It was perfect,” she said. “I didn’t miss a single note.”
“So you made it?” Max asked.
“I’ll find out in a few days.”
“Well, come on, let’s go get something to eat to celebrate.” Hanna hesitated, but only for a second before she took his hand.
They took the train back to Gutenstat, got off at Maulbeerstrasse, and walked to Herr Brichtman’s shop. “Strudel is my favorite way to celebrate,” Hanna said, clinging to him as they walked, and he thought of their first kiss there.
“Mine, too,” he said.
But as they approached the shop, three SA stood outside the front entrance, and Herr Brichtman was arguing with them, his voice rising with anger.
Hanna handed Max her violin case and ran toward them before Max could stop her. “Is everything all right? Herr Brichtman, are you okay?”
“You should not be here,” he said to Hanna. He caught Max’s eyes, and Max understood instantly that everything was not all right. That he needed to get Hanna away from here now.
“Hanna, let’s go.” Max grabbed her elbow and gently tried to pull her down the street, away from the SA.
But one of the men turned to look right at Hanna. “Another dirty Jude? Is she yours?”
“No, I don’t even know these people,” Herr Brichtman lied. “They are just wanting a pastry. That is what I do, I run this shop. I told you, I’ve run it for thirty years.” His hands shook as he spoke, but his voice was resolute.
Max pulled Hanna across the street. “Max,” she said, ripping her hand away. “We can’t just leave him there. What if they arrest him?”
“And how are you going to stop them?” Max asked. She opened her mouth, then closed it again.
They watched for another minute, from relative safety across the street. Until the SA finally left Herr Brichtman alone, and he walked back inside his bakeshop. Max and Han
na both exhaled. But neither one of them was hungry any longer.
Back at the bookshop, Hanna was still angry. “I hate this stupid Hakenkreuz flag you hang out front.” She yelled at Max like it was his fault, but they both knew, if he didn’t hang the flag, the SA would be here harassing him, just like they had been with Herr Brichtman.
“I hate it too,” Max said gently, locking the door to the shop behind them and leading her upstairs to his apartment.
She kissed him, and he could feel her anger in the intensity of her lips on his. Or maybe it was just her fire, her passion. They made love and spent the rest of the afternoon in his bed, naked. He wasn’t sure if Hanna’s forgiveness was from her fear at seeing Herr Brichtman accosted on the street or her joy and relief at having her audition go so well. Or simply because she loved him, that she could never stay mad at him forever.
“If I am to make the orchestra,” she said, sometime after the darkness of night had overcome the bedroom—she stroked his bare arm with her finger, the way she might play a love song on her violin—“you will need to be my husband to move into the city with me, to travel around with me for concerts.”
He got out of bed and searched his pants’ pockets for the ring—he’d been carrying it around ever since she gave it back to him. He took it out again now, slipped it on her delicate, strong finger. She held it up to admire it, the diamond glinting in the candle he’d lit on the table.
“Please don’t ever take it off again,” Max said.
“Please don’t ever leave me again,” Hanna answered back.
Hanna received her acceptance letter to the symphony in the mail, two weeks after her audition. She ran into his shop, waving it in the air and screaming in the middle of the afternoon. She was being invited to participate as a third chair violinist for the 1935–36 orchestra season, on a one-year trial basis. It was the most tenuous of acceptances, but it was an acceptance nonetheless.
In Another Time Page 23